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--he has been this size pretty much his entire career
--he has been pretty consistent in his performance over his career
--he is clearly very aware his family history and has worked to manage his weight

again, unless his 2014 also s8cks like a hoover on high I think folks need to consider this an off year which is common to any player.

Cecil Fielder had a 130 OPS+ through age 29 then went 114-111-108-101-86-cut in spring training. Prince is in his age 29 season. If I was running the Tigers I'd be a bit nervous about that $24 mil a year owed to Prince through 2020. Well, if I ran them I'd never have handed out that deal, but that is secondary.

It seems a bit early for age or blubber related decline. Methinks injury. Didn't the Tigers modify their park in some way that Fielder's numbers?

On this board, it's never too early for these claims. People will make it year after year (and have) and when it does finally happen, they will say "See, I told you so, I knew it would happen."

Fielder's weight is not a major issue, people who claim it are idiots. As Harvey has pointed out, he's been like this his whole career, is very much aware of the expectations that the health police have for him and has actively done a good job of keeping it under control. The truth is that blubbery people seem to have fewer injury issues than the thin people of the game, you aren't going to see Fielder pulling a hamstring like you get from the Jose Reyes's of the world.

It could be injury, it could be age(which is a much bigger future concern than his weight) it could be just a bad year.

Fielder's weight is not a major issue, people who claim it are idiots. As Harvey has pointed out, he's been like this his whole career, is very much aware of the expectations that the health police have for him and has actively done a good job of keeping it under control. The truth is that blubbery people seem to have fewer injury issues than the thin people of the game, you aren't going to see Fielder pulling a hamstring like you get from the Jose Reyes's of the world.

Literally none of this is responsive. It's an established fact that big guys tend to decline earlier, and more swiftly, than thinner, more athletic guys. This is uncontroversial, and trying to claim that Prince Fielder is a magical exception to this is baldest fantasy and wishful thinking.

Literally none of this is responsive. It's an established fact that big guys tend to decline earlier, and more swiftly, than thinner, more athletic guys. This is uncontroversial, and trying to claim that Prince Fielder is a magical exception to this is baldest fantasy and wishful thinking.

There really isn't that many players to compare "the" fat guys to.. you have a group of catchers that isn't really relevant to any discussion about injuries...then you have your Matt Stairs, Giambi's and David Wells who seemed to last forever, or conversely you have a handful of fat guys who didn't(John Kruk, Luzinski etc) ... but for every fat guy,(guy who started the majors as a fatso...that is...not your Andruw Jones or Carlos Baergas) that has had a shortened career. You can easily find a dozen thin guys who also had shortened careers..Fielder isn't an exception, he's just like ANY other player...not more, not less because of his size. If he is over 33, then I could see a sharp age related decline...just like you would with any player(see Dale Murphy, Don Mattingly etc) but to argue he's more subjected to age related decline in his age 30 season because he is fat, is ridiculous. IF he was a thin player who got fat, then yes, I can see the argument...he would be showing character flaws, laziness, which is of course going to speed up any age related decline...

Size isn't that big of a deal for a career first baseman.

Obviously the most famous ball player of all time, is widely considered to be a fat guy. (not by today's standards maybe) and his career lasted fairly long.

Given that it is an established fact that fat players get injured more often, and also that it is an established fact that fat players get injured less often, I think the jury is out on the source of Fielder's problems.

My impression also, and while weight does tend to catch up w people eventually, I don't know that age 29 is a standout age for that to happen. I'd be interested to know how similarly large guys (I wouldn't call him fat, exactly...) held up. Speaking of which, Crispix, isn't it primarily hefty starting pitchers who hold up well, as opposed to hitters?

--he has been pretty consistent in his performance over his career...

Yes, and when he's had a mildly 'off' year it coincided with his Babip dipping below .300. He's not far off his career worst for that in 2013. Something else is at play.

Wow--I had forgotten how dreadfully BBRef sees Prince's defense. Its eeaten up 17 wins to date. He's almost as bad on defense as is the overall difference between a solid major league regular and a AAAA player. Wow squared. That's genuinely awful.

I don't know who holds the record, but given the length of his contract it might be possible for Prince to be worse in the field than any ballplayer in history. Adjusting for age he's worse than Jeter, iirc.

--he is clearly very aware his family history and has worked to manage his weight

To his credit. I've never had that particular problem but friends tell me it's a daily battle.

again, unless his 2014 also s8cks like a hoover on high I think folks need to consider this an off year which is common to any player.

True. Love to know why, though. Doesn't take much. Even a minor injury we'll never hear about to the power hand of a hitter whose value comes from that can send his value plummeting.

True. Love to know why, though. Doesn't take much. Even a minor injury we'll never hear about to the power hand of a hitter whose value comes from that can send his value plummeting.

Nothing wrong with trying to know, but why do many immediately go to girth as the first possibility? When it hasn't been the problem before? It's way down the list on possibilities. Injury and just bad luck are the most obvious selections and would have been the first thing anyone would have proposed if this was a 30 year old Carl Crawford or Adrian Gonzalez having this issue.

Fielder's weight is not a major issue, people who claim it are idiots. As Harvey has pointed out, he's been like this his whole career, is very much aware of the expectations that the health police have for him and has actively done a good job of keeping it under control.

Wow--I had forgotten how dreadfully BBRef sees Prince's defense. Its eeaten up 17 wins to date. He's almost as bad on defense as is the overall difference between a solid major league regular and a AAAA player. Wow squared. That's genuinely awful.

I don't know who holds the record, but given the length of his contract it might be possible for Prince to be worse in the field than any ballplayer in history. Adjusting for age he's worse than Jeter, iirc.

Well, almost half of that is positional adjustment. Even Keith Hernandez lost 11 wins to positional adjustment. Fielder's at -89 runs on defense, which isn't good of course, but far from historical. Jeter's at -233. Prince has no chance to "catch" him.

His BB rate has dropped 3 consecutive years, from almost 16% in '10 to 11.6% this year. Only his rookie year saw a lower walk rate. Meanwhile his K rate has risen to over 20% from 18.6% in '11 and just under 14.5% last year. Combined, he's striking out more than walking for the 1st time in 3 years, and has the lowest BB/K ratio since '08 (and 3rd lowest of his career).

I'm sure he did, and it's selective memory on my part as they would make a good play against us and I would think "And he's a poor fielder?" and those plays stick in my mind, while the mistakes just drift out as 'things happen'.

I don't see how a guy who, in his six full seasons in Milwaukee, had his OPS+ go 110-157-130-166-135-164 gets labeled as "consistent". I'm pretty sure I said at the time of the signing by Detroit that the immediate problem wasn't necessarily his weight but was the fact that he was only a truly valuable player in half of his years to that point. This year is obviously a major step backwards compared to any point in his career (the 110 in his first full year at age 22 isn't really relevant) but even if he recovered to a 130s level he's still not very good because he's so useless at anything besides hitting.

His BB rate has dropped 3 consecutive years, from almost 16% in '10 to 11.6% this year.

He's also being intentionally walked a lot less this year. Looking at walk rate as (BB-IBB)/(PA-IBB), his seasonal walk rates from 2006-20013 are 8.4, 10.5, 9.6, 12.8, 13.9, 11.4, 10.0, 10.8. A little down from his peak, but not catastrophically so.

according to who? everyone and their uncle was predicting that between moving from fenway to Anaheim (ballpark) and his size that it was an awful contract and mo was going to step back from his performance as a red sox.

i think most folks here agree that a slugger with minimal other skills than slugging is a high risk to tank in his early 30's.

but if i read some here a guy with almost 1300 games in the majors isn't allowed to have an off year.

do i really need to drag out the several hundred players including hall of famers who in mid-career had a subpar season?

now if 2014 is like 2013 i will hop on board the 'fielder may be done' bus.

Carrying excessive weight, especially a lot of it, increases physical deterioration -- especially back, knee and foot problems. That is reason to downgrade Fielder's chances of performing well (or often) from ages 33-36 or so. The effects of weight are not likely to turn him into a dud overnight ... unless he's dealing with a weight-related injury.

cfb, I assume you were referring to Ruth. Ruth became fat, he didn't start out that way. But, yeah, he did alright.

On "consistency" ... what HW said. Remember that a 30 point difference in OPS+ is only about a 15% difference in OPS. Remember also that, all else equal, a 10 point drop in BA will lead to about a 25+ point drop in OPS (for someone like Fielder).

But ISO is an area where Prince seems inconsistent. I say seems because I don't know what sort of variation we would expect but this seems like a lot to me:

Average ISO for the last 4 seasons of "just" 219 and HR/FB of 13% is not particularly promising. As he moves into his 30s, if anything, we would expect the power numbers to go up, not down.

Mo might be an OK comparison but his decline was from age 30 to 31. That decline was almost entirely BA/BABIP driven. He lost 40 points of BA. There was some decline in HR/FB and some in walk rate (partially loss of IBB) but from 28-30 Mo had a 378 BABIP. That wasn't entirely flukey as it was 354 for the three years before that. At 31, the dropped to 311 and was just 317 from 31 to 34. A 60 point drop in BABIP will ruin anybody's stat line.

It's not like Mo's body went from Mike Trout at 30 to Cecil Fielder at 31. There's no obvious reason why weight should directly cause a massive and immediate drop in BABIP or why such a change should occur at ages 29-31. Certainly it's possible that Mo's weight finally caught up with him that season and he started having issues with his back or knees or something.

Prince on the other hand had never had a particularly high BABIP and you see the standard occasional 10-20 point swings. His career average is 302 and the last 4 have been 291, 306, 321, 292. Prince's main issue this year is the big power drop so whatever the problem is, it's manifesting itself in a very different way than Vaughn's issue.

Boog's decline looks more similar to what Fielder's going through right now. It's hard to tell with Boog as offensive contexts were shifting around a lot in his late 20s, early 30s, he became a bit more of a platoon player and he had a big bounce back in his age 33 season (then collapsed at 34). But for most of his late 20s, early 30s he was still an above-average hitter for a 1B but nothing special and his decline from his peak was mainly a decline in power.

bWAR likes Boog's defense well enough so his overall WAR remained average or better but from 29-32 he put up only 10 oWAR. Prince is on pace for about 2 oWAR this year but, with his defense, he always needs to compile at least 3 oWAR to even reach average.

Howard's decline is similar to Boog's -- a big drop in power, not BABIP-driven. In fact this year Howard has the highest BABIP he's had since 2006 and a career-high LD rate. Ain't it weird we live in a baseball age where a 200 ISO just doesn't cut it anymore.

On dWAR -- I'm pretty sure Sheffield is the record holder at -29. fWAR has him a little worse. Sheffield had several seasons where he gave back an average player on defense. If Prince can last that long, he will pass Sheff.

Carrying excessive weight, especially a lot of it, increases physical deterioration -- especially back, knee and foot problems. That is reason to downgrade Fielder's chances of performing well (or often) from ages 33-36 or so. The effects of weight are not likely to turn him into a dud overnight ... unless he's dealing with a weight-related injury.

Don't doubt it, but the mere act of playing the game increases physical deterioration... I do not, nor have I ever seen, anything remotely presenting reasonable evidence that being a large body and playing major league baseball, has a higher chance of a quicker decline than other physical characteristics. Players of all shapes and sizes have 1. aged poorly 2. aged well. 3. aged as expected... and there doesn't seem to be any trends that stand out.... now there have been trends about the type of player skills (walks and hits for powers, age worse than speed and hits for average players) which arguably coincide often times with body types, but I think it's a correlation looking for a causation when people look at it.

I don't think that there is any reasonable argument to be made, that Prince will age more poorly than any other player of his skill set. And I think projecting his decline before his age 32 season is completely foolish. Is it reasonable to argue he'll have an early decline? Of course it's reasonable to argue that. Not because of his body style, but because of the history of players with his skill set has that happens, but again that history says it starts happening around 32-33 years and not age 29...

cfb, I assume you were referring to Ruth. Ruth became fat, he didn't start out that way. But, yeah, he did alright.

you don't allow for any reasonable variance? you think a player who has a range of performance from 130-166 is inconsistent?

Ok, so if you want to argue that 30 points of OPS+ swing isn't inconsistent then that's a judgement call and I'm not going to argue the point. I should probably have just brought up bWAR and maybe not even bothered discussing consistency. Let's just judge him on his worthiness as a player from year to year. We'll throw out the -.7 in his first full season to be more fair, here's the rest of his career: 3.6/1.6/6.3/1.7/4.6/4.9/0.6

The big problem is him being barely a worthwhile starter in 2 of 7 seasons if bWAR has any accuracy and well below average in a 3rd. You can say that the OPS+ differences are well within normal variance but that means that within normal variance he can be a below average starter for a team. It still supports my original point that the most significant concern for Detroit isn't the end of his deal but instead is that there's a good chance he won't be a particularly valuable player in some of the seasons early in the deal.

HW, you're right on Dunn. I had sorta given up on him staying in the league long enough to give it a run but with his bat rebounding a bit, he will probably hang on to pass Sheff.

CFB ... 1) I agree there's no reason to expect Fielder to go bad at 29; 2) but as you note old player skill players don't age as well. That group includes pretty much all the tubbies for the obvious reason that if you aren't contributing defensively and on the bases then you gotta hit. A few of the big guys were considered OK defenders and one or two even good (George Scott) ... but then those guys early days were before my time so I don't know if they were fit then got fat or were always fat.

It's certainly correct that we suck at projecting age-related decline and nobody should speak with certainty about who's gonna go off a cliff and who won't. But you put together some pieces we know:

a) old player skills guys tend to decline faster
b) baserunning and defense decline with age
c) big folks (just generally) put more strain on their feet, knees and back

and I think we have to conclude that the collapse risk of fat guys are likely to be higher and the longevity chances lower than otherwise similar position players. It would be great if somebody did a proper study. (I got nothing to say on pitchers.)

And it doesn't necessarily require significant offensive decline. As Jim's numbers show (and HW and I have mentioned), Fielder is already a big enough liability in the non-hitting areas that he has to hit really well to be average. If either the defense/baserunning get worse (highly likely) or the offense slips even a little (not expected until maybe 32-34), then he slips towards replacement level. We need look no further than Howard at ages 30-31 for an example -- pretty good 126-127 OPS+ but just 2.4 WAR in two full seasons.

That goes on for all players of course so, without a more thorough study, none of us can say we're correct. One need only look at somebody like Mike Cameron. He was an old-man hitter but a good baserunner and great defender in his youth. He looked like he stayed in shape to me but still his defense dropped to average-ish in his 30s and his baserunning dropped a smidgen but the bat remained pretty much the same bat. Cameron went from a consistent 3-4 WAR player to a consistent 2-3 WAR player strictly because of defense. You're correct that Fielder could follow that exact same pattern (leading to a move to DH surely), find himself not really very useful and losing playing time and that alone would not be convincing evidence of fat-related decline.

Re: Fielder's weight being a problem with potential injury, isn't it generally accepted fact that being significantly overweight can cause knee and back problems due to the body carrying all those extra pounds around? Granted, baseball players are "old" at a fairly young age relative to the general population and even the tubby ones are usually in above average athletic shape so I imagine there's less risk of them suffering negative effects from weight while still in their playing days.

Re: Fielder's weight being a problem with potential injury, isn't it generally accepted fact that being significantly overweight can cause knee and back problems due to the body carrying all those extra pounds around?

In the same way that it's a generally accepted fact that more than 100 pitches in a game is a huge injury potential. Other words...not really at all to the point that it's a "fact".

Has there been an unusually high number of big players who have had knee or back problems? I mean you have Mickey Mantle, Scott Rolen(and pretty much every third baseman it seems has bad back), Mattingly, Murphy etc.... I've pointed out guys like Giambi, Stairs, Wells etc earlier in the thread and it just seems that these type of injuries don't happen any more frequently to big guys than normal size guys.

Is it possible that being big will lead to these type of injuries? Sure maybe later in life, but is there any real evidence that bigger "athletes" at age 32 or so are more prone to the onset of these injuries than other players? Or is it like the pitch counts and Strasburg situation, where people are projecting because "that seems likely?"

Being obese can increase your risk of all kinds of health problems, but many (even most) will not experience symptoms at any given small time interval of a couple years in the early 30's. In terms of injury in the general population, obesity can offer some protection from traumatic bone injury, since there's a little more padding to cushion in collisions, although you could argue that that benefit might to be balanced out by feet lost to diabetes. Obese people also aren't usually engaging in the kind of physical activity that can lead to traumatic musculoskeletal injury at a youngish age. There are an overwhelming number of health problems associated with obesity, but in general the serious health problems don't really manifest themselves until later.

Probably the biggest challenge in health decision-making is that many of the consequences of poor health decisions don't really show until way after you've made the bad decision. It's so easy to smoke that cigarette or eat those extra french fries or whatever if you don't see/feel it immediately.

I've never been nearly as fat as Fielder, but I had a bad back from obesity back in my mid-20s, before I started working out and dropped 90 lbs. I can attest that being overweight is bad for your joints and muscles.

FWIW, if you see Fielder with his shirt off (lucky me!), he's not fat. He's solid. I'm not saying he's "ripped" or "shredded" or whatever, but there's definitely some visible muscle there and barely any flab. This doesn't change the fact that he's carrying around a lot of weight, but the idea that he's some fat slob isn't accurate. Maybe he was in the past, but as of last season, he's a pretty well built dude.

good chance he won't be a particularly valuable player in some of the seasons early in the deal.

well, 2013 supports that point.

and again, if he hits like this in 2014 I will not argue anyone suggesting fielder may be on the road out of the league

because as everyone agrees, if he ain't hittin' he ain't helpin'

As others have said, it's impossible to say if this is an off-year or the beginning of the end. The problem is, pretty much everyone agrees that the out years will be bad. Therefore, if he has sub-par years, which is entirely likely, early in the contract, it doesn't matter if he has a bounce back year left or not. If you're punting the last couple of years, you really can't afford to punt a couple in the middle, too.

I like him, I hope he bounces back. Given the history of large, poor defensive first basemen, I'm not terribly optimistic he'll ever again be a high WAR player. It isn't as if his defense and baserunning are going to get better.